


homeroom angel

by stazybo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Character Study, F/M, M/M, Mechanic Dean Winchester, Writer Castiel (Supernatural), also a little on dean's relationship with women, briefly, f/m stuff is pretty background, like an occult mechanic tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29334240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stazybo/pseuds/stazybo
Summary: Local mechanic sent spiraling by unwitting pinup nerd, more at 11.(This is a show about men looking at each other so I wrote a character study about men looking at each other.)
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24





	homeroom angel

Castiel Novak looks like his mom dressed him, which should be grounds for arrest as far as Dean can reckon. Looking good is _easy_. You pick a movie with a guy who you think girls might think is hot, then you rummage around a thrift store until you find shit that looks kind of like what he’s wearing, and then _boom_. There you go. Dean was doing a Steve McQueen thing today, and already today he’d gotten a whole entire girl checking him out in the hallway. Easy.

What he means is there’s no reason to be seventeen years old and sitting in English class in permapress khakis and a white buttondown that’s both a size too big and, apparently, _ironed_. Castiel comes in every day with his dark hair combed down into a neat side part with some kind of gel. It makes his head look really round, and that, in turn, makes his eyes look huge and round and unsettling. Whole thing’s kinda uncanny valley. He looks better after a few periods of moving around and scratching at his scalp and just being a human being, when the same gel that keeps his hair flat in the morning is now holding it into spikes and cowlicks (Dean hates that he’s noticed all this). And this is 2005, that’s how men’s hair is supposed to look. That’s how Dean’s hair looks. It adds some angles to Castiel’s face, makes him look his own age, instead of like, twelve.

The eyes are still kind of intense, though. Dean kind of wishes he sat behind Castiel in English, instead of two seats over, in the same row. If he was behind Castiel, all he’d see were the skinny shoulders and spiky dark hair, and that would be the end of this. But from this angle, any time he glances around the room, he gets Castiel’s profile, and just a sliver of the blue from his eyes, and it makes him think about looking at him straight on, about getting the full force of his gaze, of the intense focus he gives whatever is in front of him. It also gets him a view of Castiel writing, his long, thick fingers curled around some stupid ergonomic mechanical pencil. He’s this skinny guy with huge, strong hands that look about ten years older than the rest of him. He looks like a puppy who hasn’t grown into his paws.

Anyway, Dean fucking hates English class. He cuts it more and more as the year goes on, and has to really turn on the charm with Ms. Richards towards the end of the year so she lets him make up the work. Biology is after English, and that’s way better. Biology means Nicole Bertozzi, with her dark eyes and long, looong legs, and that delicate little anklet she likes to wear. Biology means everything makes sense again.

Fifteen years later, Dean wishes maybe he hadn’t cut as much English class. Biology hasn’t been especially relevant to his life for a while (other than the basics of course), but as it turns out, books and magazines are gonna be giving him a whole lot of trouble.

They shouldn’t be! Dean doesn’t work with either. He’s a car guy. Well, an occult car guy. Basically, if you’re in the continental United States and you need to get your Dodge Charger enchanted so it can drive through the gates of hell, Dean’s the guy you come talk to. It’s not something you can really advertise, but when your best friend is some kind of hacker goddess, with her fingers in all kinds of weird online pies full of the kinds of people who might need to run over a ghost with a Subaru or keep a ghoul imprisoned in a VW Bus. Business is good these days.

This does, of course, mean a lot of Charlie just hanging around his shop, bothering him with stupid questions about warding her desktop against thelemic viruses, and leaving her shit everywhere. Today it’s a pile of fucking magazines. She’s a computer person, what the hell does she have actual, physical magazines for? It must be a pride thing. Earlier, she was shoving one of them in his face, talking about the story on her friend’s “breakthrough in social programming” or, as Dean understood it, “cryptocurrency server heist.” And then, of course, forgetting all of them when she got a booty text from some goth girl, and dropped Dean like a hot potato. Half his couch is a puddle of shiny paper, now.

He hasn’t held a print magazine in his hands in…God, who knows how long. Weird. It made him feel young, like he was sprawled on a motel bed, pawing through a discarded issue of Entertainment Weekly for an interview with Jeri Ryan (and its accompanying photo).

This isn’t _Entertainment Weekly_ , it’s something classier. Like, something he’d find next to _The New Yorker_ on Sam’s coffee table. He’s not familiar. (If Dean’s gonna put actual effort into his reading, he wants a _book_ , like, a real one, not these big long-ass articles. News should be in the form of terse, to-the-point, five-paragraph articles, not a million words of self-indulgent bullshit.) Anyway, Dean’s sick of tidying Charlie’s shit, and he pitches backwards onto the couch to flip through the thing when, turn the page, _bam_ , there’s Castiel Novak sprawled over two entire pages at the center of the magazine.

Dean’s first instinct is to slam the thing closed.

He opens it again.

It’s not. Ok. It’s not actually a centerfold. This is a normal fucking magazine, you’d never need to carry it out of a store in a paper bag. But like, functionally, it involves an image of a person laying down, across two pages of a magazine, at its center. So if Dean’s brain immediately regresses back to the age of 15, the time when he spent the most time in his life both gazing at real centerfolds and also knowing Castiel Novak in person, maybe he can be forgiven.

Cas is pictured in a library or a bookstore or some shit. He’s a writer now, a real-ass author, so that’s a little on the nose, but God…nothing wrong with a cliché done well. The headline floating parallel to him is in big, imposing white font: “ANGEL OF THURSDAY: Unraveling Christian Americana with Castiel Novak.”

There are dark bookshelves at his side, parallel to the camera, and a warm light source from behind. He’s shot a little from above, sprawled over a big winged armchair and a matching footrest, a copy of _Solaris_ upside down on his stomach. He’s in fucking khakis, and a fucking white buttondown. Exactly what he used to wear in third period English class. But that’s the _problem_. Do you get it? That’s the whole _fucking_ problem. Because this time around the khakis are a couple shades darker and they fit really fucking well, so you’re looking at them and wondering if its your own dirty mind imagining thick, heavy muscle in the thighs wearing them, or if it’s really there. And the white shirt’s got the first couple buttons open, so you get a look at the full, uninterrupted line of his throat and all the interesting little valleys and shadows there, and lower down the fabric is pulling a little over the chest, so you don’t even _have_ to imagine that apparently someone’s been working out a little, growing into those big paws over the past decade. Over that there’s an actual fucking tweed blazer, with the elbow patches and everything. Brown, with a little orange woven through the subtle plaid of it. Obviously someone had been like “oh, this will bring out your eyes” and alright yeah, maybe. Shut up.

And the other problem is that none of this looks ironed, it all looks lightly _rumpled_ , like maybe someone’s…just finished rumpling him. Like if you’d been there thirty seconds ago, some cute librarian might’ve had a leg thrown over him, with their face pressed up against his throat to muffle a giggle.

He’s, unfortunately for Dean, looking right at the camera. Same big, drooping blue eyes, sharply angled nose, expression like you’ve just disturbed a pretty good nap. The puppy fat’s melted off his face, you can see more angles in the jaw and the cheekbones now. It’s not an especially gorgeous face. Not a symmetrical leading-man face (Faces like that don’t do all that much for Dean. He’s got one of them himself, he has to look at it in the mirror twice a day, whether he wants to or not.) Maybe he’s on the handsome end of character actor, with the start of some interesting cragginess creeping into its lines. It’ll just get more interesting as it gets older.

So Castiel Novak looks like a fucking dork, still. A dork from someone’s wet dream. Well, like, maybe someone who watches a lot of PBS and has an appreciation for cinematography, but is also still really horny.

Getting turned on by this is worse than…ok, so gay porn is _gay_ but it’s also _porn_ , right? Like, it’s _supposed_ to turn you on, it’s designed that way, the guys in it have huge dicks and unreal bubble asses, and they’re _fucking_. This isn’t that. This is an image of a fully clothed man, on a chair, with a book. And it’s got Dean squirming in his seat.

Another night there would be a solution to this. Dean would grab his leather jacket off the back of the chair, cruise over to Meany’s and sit at the bar with a couple fingers of bourbon until someone noticed him for it (Maybe he’s got mixed feelings about his leading man face, but pretty girls in bars usually don’t, and god bless them for it), and then maybe for a few hours he’ll have more pressing concerns than a pair of big, drooping eyes on a glossy magazine page.

(It’s a straightforward interaction. Maybe he’s making her into his Nicole Bertozzi for the night, but he’s pretty sure that she’s making him into some Chris or Nick or Jake that never noticed _her_ in English class, and maybe if he can be a version of Chris from English class that’ll call her “Beautiful” and bury his face between her legs, then Jesus Christ, at least he’s helping someone with something, right? Right?)

(Over the years, Dean’s laughed along with plenty of jokes about how confusing and crazy women are, and, honestly, made plenty himself, but in the end he never quite bought it. Women just like it when you make it clear you’re gonna let them steer the boat. Maybe take care of them just a little, maybe let them take care of you, depends on the situation. It’s not that hard.)

(Well, ok, sometimes they want Dean to do the steering, and that makes him nervous. He can do it! Oh, sure, he can do it. He’s not gonna back out of a good time just cuz she’s panting to be slammed up against a wall and maybe Dean isn’t as much of a slammer-up-against-the-wall as he looks like he is. But maybe he likes it better when a girl throws a leg over his lap, settles in, puts his hands just where she likes, tells him clear and simple “do this thing, do it in _just_ this way, and I’ll be happy.” Maybe it’s the same feeling as when you follow your favorite recipe, knowing that you’ve got a guide on how to do every step, knowing that the thing at the end will be delicious. Maybe he likes to be flushed and slick-fingered and happy-tired, looking down at a well-cooked meal or a sleepy, satisfied girl, knowing that he started something, did it correctly, and _finished_ it. No loose ends. No unfinished business. That shit drives him crazy.)

(He likes women. That’s not a lie, but maybe he uses that truth in ways that…ways that Charlie would look at him sideways about. Maybe he uses it like “if I like women enough I don’t have to deal with --” And Charlie would say “Of course you like women, smeghead, it’s just that you also like --“)

But now it’s after midnight on a Monday, and there’s a literal foot of snow outside, and even if Meany’s is open it’s probably got about three people in it counting the bartender, and those are odds even Dean isn’t comfortable with. He pushes the pile of magazines off the couch and lays back, and tries very hard to think about nothing at all.

Here’s the problem. Castiel Novak writes what they call magic realism, which is kind of on the borderline between fantasy and literary fiction. And Novak is kind of interested in tipping that balance closer to fantasy on this new project he’s working on. It’s very much about American mythology, about the open road, and half-forgotten local legends, and the spooky bond people can get with their cars when they drive them and fix them and crash them and fix them again. And apparently, Novak’s not such a car guy, so he needs to do research. And Castiel Novak knows Fergus Crowley, a writer and publisher who’s got some sketchy deep web connections, and if you’re moderately famous and have some sketchy deep web connections, you probably know Charlie Bradbury. And Charlie Bradbury. Well, Charlie Bradbury is sprawled on the couch in Dean’s office with her laptop, slurping on an iced coffee roughly the size of an oil drum and asking Dean if he’d ever be interested in consulting with a writer. And Dean doesn’t know what’s going on yet, and he’s a little distracted with soldering this rune into an intake pipe, and sure, he likes people, he’s a people person. Invite him on down. Things are gonna be slow Friday, any time then would be great. And Charlie’s like, sweet, and she messages Crowley back to give his friend the info. And then Dean’s done with the rune and finally, _finally_ he thinks to ask. _Anyone I’ve ever heard of?_ And Charlie’s like, you know Castiel Novak? And every single muscle in Dean’s body locks up.

And he opens the door at 10 a.m. sharp on Friday to six feet of unfinished business.

**Author's Note:**

> You wanna know what I did. You wanna know what I fucking did. I listened to "Centerfold" by J. Geils Band a bunch of times in a row, at the peak of my pandemic Destiel spiral, and this thing was birthed fully-formed from my noggin. Also maybe lately I've been thinking about this idea of _touchability_ as the thing that makes someone sexy, rather than strictly physical appearance. I don't know how to explain it so well, the piece itself is probably more helpful than this note. If it's helpful at all. Anyway. I'm dying.
> 
> Oh btw i have a spn sideblog on tumblr, it's [shamayimm](https://shamayimm.tumblr.com/) . Come on down, we'll suffer together.


End file.
